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The Experience of Meaning and Hermeneutics

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The Experience of Meaning and Hermeneutics THE EXPERIENCE OF MEANING AND HERMENEUTICS Vasile Macoviciuc∗∗∗ [email protected] Abstract : The author sustains the necessity/possibility of a theoretical- methodological complementarity among structuralism, semiotics, and hermeneutics within the effort to conceptualize meaning as existential experience. These analytic perspectives must be also received as contributions pertaining to the sphere of the ontology of the humane. Keywords : semiotics, understanding/comprehension, interpretation, hermeneutics, meaning, language. “Language – notes Hans-Georg Gadamer – is the environment in which the I and the world unite or rather in which we are presented with their primal [co]-belonging.” 1 Due to this multi-dimensional symbiosis, the grasping of meaning cannot be a purely intellectual operation, but “engages the entire human being” 2, assuming the recognition of some methodological criteria, very different as source, significance or comprehensive goal. If the structural method and semiotics are relatively recent in European culture, hermeneutics had a historical evolution from antiquity on, receiving changes that seriously affected its theoretical shape, fields of problems, and stakes. Schleiermacher is taken as the founder of modern hermeneutics since, on the one hand, he believes that this can no longer be reduced to its traditional realm (interpretation of the Bible), but covers the large field of moral sciences and, on the other hand, it notices the fact that the understanding of the part (the element) is conditioned by the understanding of the text as a whole. His intention is to ground a general theory of the art of understanding and interpretation that unifies and guides the special hermeneutics. This is why he displays the phenomena of language: what must (and can) be assumed within the hermeneutic act and what can be discovered in and by it is no more than language. The effective significance of the word depends on the internal context an, finally, on the whole it pertains to. Therefore, our access to signification cannot be reduced to the grammatical understanding of the text, but needs to add a technical interpretation. The grammatical interpretation rebuilds the aria of significance of linguistic elements that specifies and by which the intention of the whole is realized. The technical interpretation precisely identifies the global context by and within which the terms receive a certain semantic shape and are functionally individualized in a far more comprising message; at the same time, the joints of the textual ensemble is confronted with the general laws of combination. Thus, one gets a detachment of the interpreter from his own experiences and opinions in order to be receptive to (and notice) those that belong to the author. The creative spirit is mostly unpredictable and settles within language unexpected things; its force compels the interpreter, by means of intuition, - “divinatory” in a certain perspective, states Schleiermacher – to identify himself with the author, mostly with his interior life, such that the effort of understanding adequate to the significations that the text bears. Thus the productive spirit of the text indicates and controls the interpretative ∗∗∗ Professor – The Academy of Economic Studies, Bucharest. 1 Hans-Georg Gadamer, 1976, p. 330. 2 Wilhelm Dilthey, 1942, p. 154. attempt. Although Schleiermacher especially underlines the fact that, within the hermeneutic act, one needs the spiritual fusion – therefore, not a mere solidarity – of he who wants to understand the text with the interiority of the author, we cannot say that, by means of this, he renders the interpretation psychological. He always recommends the elimination of those states, experiences, intentions, personal opinions that can lead only to a falsified reception of the message; therefore, he is the partisan of a psychological de-centration; the minimal condition – necessary, but, for sure, not sufficient – of understanding, is to renounce at oneself and to open towards the other; empathy and intuition are those aptitudes by which the noticing of the other (the author) is possible; the dimension of the author’s interiority and thought are also exteriorized by means of language, and the task of the interpreter is precisely to reconstruct the spiritual distinctive qualities of the creator starting from the textual indices – which presupposes a type of affective complicity. The fundamental exigency of hermeneutics is clearly enough stated by Schleiermacher: “we must understand the same way or better than the author”; time has a limitative action on the author and this is why the author belongs to his present and/or to some later historical phases beyond and apart from what he could express through language. Hermeneutics is an art of understanding and interpretation of an horizon of significations that, although settled in and by the text, goes beyond the textual meaning. Language – as an instrument of an inter-subjective value – renders objective processes that generate thinking, thus confessing about the individual life of the spirit. The identification (with the author) and intuition allow to catch on the text, on its stylistic components, in order to discover the life of creative spirit, beyond the manner in which life itself becomes aware within and by language, in other words in order to unveil the surplus of signification that in textually unclear. As F. Mussner notices, Schleiermacher “establishes a more and more clear distinction between language and thought and strives on finding out in what manner the first one’s interiority penetrates the second one”; thus, thought insinuates and shows up within, from, and by language, without it being able to be definitively assimilated to the grammatical meanings of the text. Hermeneutics aims towards the deep levels of signification. The act of interpretation presupposes and engages an art, i. e. as a subjective participation and skill, but this is “an art whose rules cannot be elaborated unless one starts from a certain formula; this is a historical and intuitive reconstruction, both objective and subjective, of the studies discourse.” 3 By its very nature language develops a spiritual identity, a certain vital community that dwells within language and remains linked to language. This fact justifies the two important means of hermeneutics: the intuitive capacity of identification with the object and comparison in a broad sense. By intuitive method, “posing itself, so to say, in the other’s place, it tries to directly grasp the individual”; comparative procedure “links, at first, what must be understood of something more general and then discovers the singular by establishing a comparison with other individuals which are included in the same genus.” 4 The first component of hermeneutic method, Schleiermacher continues, is, within human knowledge, feminine energy, and the second one is masculine energy. Language renders communication among people possible. The human spirit evolves and discourse (text) is but one of the possible manifestations of individual spirit that communicates with the others. The very goal of hermeneutics is to reconstruct the life of spirit settled in texts. It is an infinite task precisely because the development of spirit is perpetual. Moreover, the interpretation of the individual object can only be an approximation, a controlled methodological effort to clarify what is, by its own nature, ineffable. 3 Franz Mussner, 1972, p. 23. 4 Ibidem , pp. 93-94. Wilhelm Dilthey refers to history in order to grasp its specific logic, as this springs from various objectivisations that represent the object of the sciences of spirit. If the historicity of man and of social-cultural structures in which individuals and human groups dwell is but a truism, an evidence nobody questions any more, regarding the mode in which this historicity can be scientifically studied in order to render intelligible its grounds, goals, factors, and deep processes, the disputes were and are continuous, each point of view jealously imposing its own truth. Dilthey’s intention is to look for a ground of history and an essential coherence of historic phenomena within experience itself, refusing metaphysical speculations. The theoretic path within this field of problems is that of comprehension. Continuing Schleiermacher, Dilthey says that the understanding of the individuality of great historical figures, of great creators and works assumes a certain type of approaching towards language and, in general, towards any other statement of a human presence such that one notices, by interpretation, the objectivated expression of some interiority, the unity of meaning, a irreducible psycho- spiritual configuration. Using terms closed to those of Schleiermacher, Dilthey notes that “the ultimate goal of hermeneutic approach resides in understanding the author better than he understood himself.” 5 The value of interpretation increases when traces, vestiges, statements of a human life are written documents. In this case, interpretative techniques become – as they accept interactions, that are profitable concerning theoretical grounding, with the theory of knowledge, with the logic and methodology of some social-humane sciences – the main link that binds philosophy from historic sciences, and the main element of the effort to establish the grounds of the sciences of spirit. The possibility of the sciences of spirit is a problem one reaches (and always suggests) by circumscribing a certain modality
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